Lucien Giles Castaing-Taylor (born 10 January 1966, Liverpool, United Kingdom) is a British

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

and artist who works in film, video, and photography.

Biography

Castaing-Taylor received his B.A. at Cambridge University and his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley under Paul Rabinow. Since 2002 Castaing-Taylor has taught at Harvard University, where he is Director of the

Sensory Ethnography Lab The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University is an interdisciplinary center for the making of anthropologically informed works of media that combine aesthetics and ethnography. Production courses associated with the SEL are offered throug ...

. His works include '' In and Out of Africa'', which he made with Ilisa Barbash in 1992. It is an ethnographic video about issues of authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the African art market that won eight international awards. He also recorded the film '' Sweetgrass'' (2009), which is described as "an unsentimental elegy at once to the American West and to the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between post-Paleolithic humans and animals." He is the founding editor of the

American Anthropological Association The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 members, the association, based in Arlington, Virginia, includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, ...

’s journal ''

Visual Anthropology Review The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an organization of scholars and pra